O/T - Der uber-shed

[sladey]

Starting to neaten things up a bit



Then it was on to digging out the floor in the other half. Glad I paid someone to do this

[Sam]

Will there be an aerobics studio?

Yeah, so mums can come and do 'keep fit'

Bit sexist m8. Lads do aerobics too.

[Joelipol]

So jealous, awesome!


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[sladey]

And that side had the concrete poured….
No I don’t know what 1720 means either

Then it was onto installing the scissor lifts. This was exciting (and challenging) stuff

[sladey]

I was finally able to try out my gallows properly. Previously I’d just been using them to shift the units around the barn but this showed they worked for their intended purposes as well - lowing the lifts into their holes. Missus.




Now when they arrived, the chinglish manual had the two units side by side, and the control unit off to the left.

I wanted it off to the right so thought through the route of the cables and it seemed to make sense to me - in effect I was flipping the diagram upside down so it should still work. Shouldn’t it?

The first issue was connecting up the various pipes.

You are having to tighten up connections bent over with your head in a pit and with a 350kg weight resting above you. I was pretty nervous at first. There is a strong mechanical lock holding them up so all was well.

I found a few long threads on US forums all about installing the same lifts (but under a different name) - this gave me quite a bit of confidence.

Anyway I got it all connected up and powered it on, only to be met by a seeping sound which was hydraulic fluid leaking into the access tunnels.

Feck.

I reasoned that one of the joints I had made was weeping. It was difficult to get to and when you did try and tighten it up the whole pipe moved. so I adapted some pliers to hold the pipe in position. So I could tighten it up.

[sladey]

Did all that but it still wasn’t playing ball. The joint I was working on seemed perfectly right already.

I’d been putting off the idea that I should take all the pipes out and start again but there was no other option.

I pulled them out and looked at what I’d got. Lo and behold one of the factory joints wasn’t even finger tight. I should have checked that before installing it.

Put it all together and it was a lot better. No leaks.

However, it wouldn’t go up and down, unless I held in the emergency bypass button.

Eventually I started to look at the two magic eyes. There was one inside each step. Thinking it through I realised that instead of pointing at each other, by installing the units the other way around they were now pointing at the wall



I moved each of them to the inner edges so they are pointing at each other and …..



Voila!!!!

[Hugo 356]

No I don’t know what 1720 means either

Probably a subliminal reference to the 356/912 big bore kit


You're making my slightly too-small concrete prefab with trolley jack & axle stands look decidedly inadequate

[sladey]

And that side had the concrete poured….

OK so revisiting this picture. It shows that the vehicular entry to gather garage was in through the side. This was a nightmare because you struggled to get the car in and once it was in you could only jamb it at a 45 degree angle. - you could work on it.

It was a good excuse for a calendar pic though




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[sladey]

So the plan was to brick up that side door and create a new door in the gable end. Now bearing in mind that the previous owners had obtained planning consent to convert this barn into a 3 bed detached house there wouldn’t be any problems with that would there?

Think again. The heritage persons the council sent out thought it was a wonderful place but that moving the door would cause the catastrophic loss of 2 x 18 inch long ventilation slits.

I had to employ our own heritage person in the and and with the help of her and Ian (2.2s) we finally got consent to move the doorway.



This is it from the outside part way through being bricked up and with a new window added in


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[sladey]

They then started cutting the hole in the end wall



Eventually removing all the bricks, adding an RSJ and boarding it up




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[sladey]

Around this time work also started on the drive to the door



Suzanne was initially very reluctant to have any sort of drive over ‘her’ garden. However we got a designer bloke in to help with the garden and he said we could make it look nice and this won her over in the end.

After a bit more digging out, and with a turning bit added in



Eventually with the gravel added in this started to look really nice





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[sladey]

With the doors painted up and a beam installed to hide the RSJ (the beam made from old timbers that used to support the roof previously) it’s looking smart



(Got some blisters in the paint so going to have to get the painter back to sort that out)


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[sladey]

But I’ve leapt ahead a bit…..

In late spring the builders started the re-roofing process. It only took a couple of days to strip all the old tiles off. This lead to some amazing light inside the barn




But not very weatherproof…

They then put some membrane on which I was assured would keep the rain off



This made things look a bit green.

Around this time I started on the main sockets - you can see some of them in the above picture


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[sladey]

I decided to go with steel conduit. I bought a proper record conduit pipe bender and also a die which would allow me to cut threads in the end of the pipe

You can see the pipe bender in the above pic - it’s the red tripod thing in the middle

I’ve done plenty of home wiring before, but never used conduit. Cutting threads is hard work and the whole thing is a bit of a ball-ache. However the finished product looks great and is also really really strong. What takes ages is running all the conduit round the building. However once you’ve done that running the actual wires through is increasingly easy and quick - took about 20 minutes to have wires throughout the ring main (but it had taken about 4-6 days to run the conduit)



This was part way through the process. I ended up installing about 24 sockets - most people that walk in ask if I’ve got enough sockets - but as it will be almost always only me in there it doesn’t matter how many I have - and It’s nice to always have a socket close to hand - wherever you are


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[sladey]

By this stage it’s all starting to look a bit neater




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